BIND is a collaboration between choreographer Eileen McClory, poet Maria McManus, composer Katie Richardson, costume-maker Una Hickey, and filmmaker Conan McIvor. The dancers are Ryan O’Neill, Clara Kerr and Rosie Mullin. The poet Bebe Ashley translated the chosen lines to sign language which formed the basis for development of the movement sequences. Voice-over is by Roisín Gallagher.

This innovative contemporary dance and poetry film has been created in the Armagh Robinson Library, to celebrate its 250th anniversary.

When he died, Archbishop Robinson requested that all his personal correspondence be burned and destroyed. In 2019, the poet Maria McManus ran an international letter-writing campaign to ‘fill the void’ left behind, with new letters. We received hundreds of letters from people of all ages, and from across the globe. The subjects written about included contemporary issues, and also letters to the dead, the lost, the imagined, to the future, to the past, to the inner self, and to public figures. The library has become a home for these new letters in the present, binding the past, the future and the sense of place.

The creative team revisited the correspondence received and, selecting a handful of poignant lines, devised this beautiful homage to the legacy of the ‘healing place of the soul’, celebrating it in poetry, and movement. We explore the theme of ‘binding’ in several ways. – the binding of books, as bonds across time and generations, in the costumes and metaphorically linking corsetry to constraints on women and access to education and expression of the body, written and spoken words. The library is also a character in the film, which was recorded there in July 2021.